Word: tracked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thieves in Cleveland had better begin stepping lively. Last month a young man filched a $15.98 bag from Hermes Track and Racquet Shop and walked blithely away. But he was reckoning without Shopowner Gary Easter, 31, a former Cleveland policeman and marathoner who runs ten miles a day. Easter quickly locked up the store and gave chase...
More practically, the watching world would have to depend on the men who put Skylab into space to find the best means of bringing it back to earth with minimal risk to human life. The first priority was to track Skylab's decaying orbit as precisely as possible. That is the job of the North American Air Defense Command, whose joint U.S.-Canadian computers deep within a pink granite mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., continuously monitor the movements of 4,506 hunks of space garbage now orbiting the earth...
...worldwide array of NORAD'S space-tracking stations, using infra-red detection devices as well as radar, is so discerning that it can track an object even smaller than a basketball at a range of 20,000 miles. Even an astronaut's glove is being tracked. Beyond Skylab, the heaviest object aloft is now Salyut 6, the Soviets' manned spacecraft. Every month about 40 man-made objects re-enter the atmosphere, but only a fourth survive to strike the earth. There has never been a reported injury, although the fall of Cosmos 954 over northern Canada in January...
...planning, the margin of possible error is uncomfortably large. At about six hours before reentry, NASA'S projected impact points for Skylab's disintegrating parts occur somewhere along a path of 40,000 miles?nearly twice the circumference of the globe. At two hours, the final anticipated flight track still extends over a 13,000mile path. Testing its prediction on a falling Soviet Cosmos booster stage on April 29, NORAD made an estimate two hours before re-entry? and missed the actual impact points in the Pacific by 4,000 miles...
...Pentagon is paying about a sixth of the shuttle's cost, or $1.5 billion, it is not saying much about its plans. But these are not too hard to figure out. To control the military "high ground" of the future, the shuttle will not only launch satellites but track down others, nudge up to them and disable them if they present a threat. All of which may explain why the Soviets, who apparently have their own capacity to hunt down and kill satellites, have complained bitterly about the shuttle's military potential...